Contemporary poetry collections about war bring to mind, for me, the survivalist frame of mind that weighs the pages of Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau or the blurred lines between friend and foe in Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet. In these works we become soldiers forced to understand the physical and psychological devastation that comes with killing for country. A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, too, is a collection about war, though not in the sense of traditional combat. Laurie Ann Guerrero’s first book, and winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, presents the speaker as a soldier of sorts—exposing the war between white and brown, woman and nation, poet and self. Continue reading this post…

The passing of Imamu Amiri Baraka left a gaping void in the American literary community. In the post-integration age, many prominent ethnic minority writers have learned to avoid confrontation in the hope of achieving broad appeal and readership. As a writer (writing being only one aspect of his influential presence on earth), Baraka proved that one does not silence himself or herself to be loved but, rather, is loved because of the silences one shatters.

With love, a group of writers and musicians, lead by Thomas Sayers Ellis and James Brandon Lewis, have come together as “Heroes Are Gang Leaders.” With a name lifted from one of Amiri Baraka’s stories, the group embarked on a recording session that blended poetry and music to “outishly” echoe and honor his legacy. Below, in a choral interview, some members of the group discuss the project and its significance. Interspersed are three samplings from their future release.
[Read Interview as PDF]

Saeed Jones’ debut poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise, is a juggler with many pins in the air. Identity, sex, violence, coming of age, family, and loss—to name just a few—are all laid-out across the messy landscape of the American South. The collection is held together as much by the physicality of the land—dirt and mud, kudzu vines and hyacinth flowers—as it is by Jones’ interest in the human body—its aches and pains, its connections, its yearning—while it follows the character simply named “Boy” from his childhood in the rural South to the lights of cities of his young adulthood. Continue reading this post…

The traveling in Nicole Terez Dutton’s If One of Us Should Fall has less to do with wanderlust than it does with staging and restaging memories across a varied landscape. Such anti-stasis seems to destabilize the collection at first; the reader isn’t sure where the next stop will be, or what kind of emotionally charged vignette awaits. Continue reading this post…

A decade before publishing his full-length debut collection Fear, Some, Douglas Kearney was an active member of an all-black comic book collective, “Flatline Comics,” on the campus of Howard University. You can see an illustrator’s sensibility in all of his books, especially in their signature covers. This is most pronounced on the cover of The Black Automaton where all of the buildings are drawn in block shapes resembling a funhouse Gotham City.

Kearney’s writing challenges his readers to brush up on their pop culture and historical references, while loosening up their collars a bit as humor permeates almost all of his poetry in Fear, Some, The Black Automaton, and Patter, his most recent collection. Mr. Kearney is a celebrated poet and his numerous accolades include having his second book, The Black Automation, selected by Catherine Wagner for the National Poetry Series Prize. A winner of the prestigious Mrs. Giles Whiting Writing Award, Kearney has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and Idyllwild, among other institutions. His work—which has appeared in Poetry, Callaloo, and the Iowa Review, and many other literary journals—epitomizes what poet Thomas Sayers Ellis calls “the spoken page.” His poems are neither flat nor timid. They pulse, are often comic, and unafraid to collapse time. I would be remiss if I did not mention that Douglas Kearney is probably the most animated reader of his work I have encountered to date. Continue reading this post…

Reginald Harris, former IT Manager for the Enoch Pratt Library, has moved on up to the big(ger) city of New York to become Poetry in The Branches Coordinator and IT Director at Poets House. Autogeography, his latest poetry collection which arrived more or less with his departure from Baltimore, shows that at least one of Harris’ feet will remain planted firmly on Charm City soil. Autogeography is, if anything, a book that travels—be it formal trips across the entirety of the page, psychological jaunts across the boundaries of gender norms, or family reunions convened on alternate timelines. “Do NOT let him drive you” Harris writes in the opening poem “The Poet Behind the Wheel.” “Buckle up and hours later/ who knows where you’ll arrive.” While no poet can guarantee where her or his work will lead a reader, Harris was kind enough to answer some of our questions about how he prepared for his book’s journey. Continue reading this post…

In his debut collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Kiese Laymon opens with a series of letters to his Uncle Jimmy, the first of which recounts scenes from the last day of his uncle’s life. Uncle Jimmy, seemingly rehabilitated after cleaning up his life and kicking a drug habit, brings his mother a pack of meat with the words, “This Mama’s Meat,” scrawled in “loopy black letters” over the bloodied wax butcher paper (p. 15). Eight days later, the family makes its way to Mapp Funeral home where Laymon’s mother, Jimmy’s sister, is asking the funeral director to change her brother’s shirt. Eulogizing Jimmy, Laymon’s Aunt Sue says he “wasn’t that different from anyone in this church [. . .]. No better or no worse. And that’s what we have to accept . . . He was all of our brother” (p. 17). It’s a sobering pivot toward Laymon’s own narrative, a book-length meditation on black masculinity and the threads which make up the fabric from which Laymon is cut: his own family but also, Jackson, Mississippi, ritualized violence, Hip-Hip, and above all, insecurity in the most cosmopolitan sense of the word. Continue reading this post…

Few white poets write about race, and when they do, they mostly write about racism by exploring historical wrongs or gazing at the Other. In her new project, tentatively titled “Frayed,” Joy Katz explicitly takes on whiteness.

One of her inspirations was her adopted son, who was born Vietnam. She saw other white parents ignore their adopted children’s race and instead raise them as white. To avoid this, Katz—author of All You Do Is Perceive, The Garden Room, and Fabulae— wanted to understand what raising a child “as white” means, a difficult task when white culture is rarely discussed or explored.

Although the spark for this project was personal, the resulting poems engage whiteness in the broadest sense and employ structural innovation to “fray the fabric of whiteness” that Katz says surrounds her life. “The alternative is to keep writing unaware within whiteness,” Katz writes in her contribution to Claudia Rankine’s Open Letter Project. “And that seems impossibly limiting.” Continue reading this post…

Recovering from an intense love affair can be difficult. Just ask the director and lead actors of French drama Blue Is the Warmest Color, who’ve engaged in a public feud over the last months about the arduous process of making the film, which also won the Palm d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Based on the 2010 graphic novel Blue Angel by Julie Maroh, the film follows Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a precocious French high school student, who falls deeply into a passionate affair with an older art student named Emma, (Lea Seydoux). Experiencing sexual fulfillment for the first time, Adèle forges a strong connection with Emma, but the line between love and lust blurs as they struggle to remain bonded. Continue reading this post…

The image that adorns the cover of Alex Dimitrov’s Begging for It—a photograph from “Rimbaud in New York,” one of David Wojnarowicz’s first major series of works—is an interesting introduction to this first collection of poems. It asserts that the reader will shortly be living through Dimitrov’s saison en Enfer of sorts—the sadness of the outsider in a new society (Dimitrov having emigrated from Bulgaria to New York City), but the cover also suggests that this text will be a melange of politics and queerness. Continue reading this post…